Why would you choose Squeak today?

No flame war intended. Maybe this topic has been discussed on this list,
but I've never found a satisfactory conclusion. With "today" I mean why
to start a software project *from scratch* with Squeak?

My usage today is to load and try packages which only works under
Squeak. Yours may be different, so it would be nice to know what squeak
developers think about.

What thing does have Squeak that others doesn't?
Why would you choose Squeak over Pharo or Cincom Smalltalk?


Cheers,

Hernán

Easy.  Squeak gives me just the right proportions of freeness,
stability, and control.  The TSTTCPW approach leaves me a basic
Smalltalk interface to the underlying OS features so I'm able to make
and use my _own_ abstractions where I want and employ others'
frameworks where I don't.

Personal growth:  A great way to learn about a subject is to model it
in Smalltalk.  Magma and Maui leave me free to create and operate
complex domain models with impunity.

If Pharo's method of evolution is creationism, Squeak's is
natural-selection.  I think Squeakers are interested in harvesting the
system more than sowing the system.  But sowing _does_ occur naturally
by its community of members sharing and harvesting hand-selected
improvements appropriate for a general-purpose system.  The
conservative approach taken means the trunk is usually top-quality, so
community productivity remains good too.  It's a sane approach geared
toward ensuring the software is serving the community and not the
other way around.

For these reasons and more, I'll continue to create and nurture new
domain models based on Squeak trunk.

 - Chris



On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Hernán Morales Durand
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> A great way to learn about a subject is to model it
> in Smalltalk.

I have had that experience too; in my case, music theory.

Stef

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Hernán Morales Durand
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> No flame war intended. Maybe this topic has been discussed on this list, but
> I've never found a satisfactory conclusion. With "today" I mean why to start
> a software project *from scratch* with Squeak?

Well, here's why I chose Squeak for my project.

First, it's a mature open source project. The source code for
everything is available, and the history of development goes back for
quite a long time. That means that the Squeak ecosystem is quite well
developed. There are all sorts of ports, spin-off projects, libraries
and applications that have been created over the years. There's a lot
of expertise in the community, and they're happy to share it.

Second it's remarkably stable. There is forward progress, and there
are changes that break compatibility between releases, but it's not
done capriciously. For several years I kept OmniBrowser working all
"modern" Squeak releases, from 3.4 to 4.0. I don't bother with that
any more, but I think that's a pretty amazing continuity from one
release to the next. There are lots projects that were written against
older versions of Squeak and haven't been maintained, but which are
pretty easy to tweak if we want to use them on the latest version of
Squeak. (For example, Ian just updated his VNC implementation.)

Third, the future looks bright. We finally have a solid JIT compiler
in Cog, which has already delivered significant performance
improvements, and Eliot seems intent on delivering further
improvements in the future. I'm really happy with the port of Xtreams
from VisualWorks, and looking forward to Environments in Squeak 4.5.
Spoon also seems to be coming along steadily and I think it could
really improve the scalability of Squeak.

And finally, I just find it a pleasant system to work in. The UI is
clean and simple, and with web and mobile apps so common now, looking
"weird" isn't nearly as much of an issue as it used to be. I find
Lukas' port of the refactoring engine gives us an excellent IDE,
absolutely on par with any other Smalltalk system. I don't feel "at
home" with any other tools the way I do in Squeak.

As for other Smalltalks, I really like VisualWorks. It's fast, elegant
and powerful. It has a great team building it and great community
using it. I can't afford it for my current project, but I've used it
before, and I'll probably use it again.

Pharo, I feel more ambivalent about. When the project was first
announced, I was very interested, because I really felt there was a
need for a Squeak-like system that did away with unnecessary baggage.
But I don't like the way the project ended up developing. I find the
UI visually heavy and awkward to use. I find Polymorph way, way to
complicated and all the indirection introduced by themes makes the
design difficult to follow. There's a lot of churn in the
codebase—gratuitous changes that break compatibility but aren't really
improvements. I really like the energy and ambition of the Pharo
community, but I find it exhausting trying to follow what's going on
and I don't enjoy the confrontational style that it seems to
encourage. Pharo is certainly promising, but it hasn't yet delivered
on that promise.

Squeak has been my favorite environment for quite a long time, and it still is.

Colin

On Sun, 23 Sep 2012, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:
Here's a list of advantages which are unique to Squeak according to my
knowledge:

Fully transparent developement process. You can easily find the answer to
the question: Who changed, what, when and why?.

Great update process. You just press a button and your image will have
the latest updates. Since it uses Monticello only, therefore you can
do changes in your image and the updates will still work. And you can do
it starting from Squeak 3.10.2 (with a few glitches though, but IIRC the
whole process only requires human interaction 3 times and most of these
involve only pressing a button). All releases are product of the update
process, no manual tweaking is/was necessary.

The update process only moves forward. The devs don't push stuff just to
see if it will break or not, and roll back if they find it breaks.

Care about backwards compatibility. It's pretty unlikely that you have to
make lots of effort to make your code work in the next release. You can
see plenty of changes to the system, but the APIs rarely change.

No paid developers. This is a double-edged sword, because developement is
obviously slower this way, but the project already proved that it can move
forward without money.


Levente

>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Hernán
>
>

Hi Hernán

>
> No flame war intended. Maybe this topic has been discussed on this
> list, but I've never found a satisfactory conclusion. With "today" I
> mean why to start a software project *from scratch* with Squeak?

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.general/162600/focus=162659
shows a similar discussion. Especially my reply in that thread is still
valid.

One addition:
  I have legacy software in Squeak (mainly 3.8) part of which I could
easily (no change?) port to 4.2 because it benefited from Cog. This is a
good reason to start new projects in Squeak because I feel confident
that if I ever need to port them to a future version it will be painless.

Cheers

Herbert

On 12-09-24 8:34 AM, Herbert König wrote:
> Hi Hernán
>
>>
>> No flame war intended. Maybe this topic has been discussed on this
>> list, but I've never found a satisfactory conclusion. With "today" I
>> mean why to start a software project *from scratch* with Squeak?

I believe that human beings are more peaceful and fulfilled when they
are able to try to realize their potential. This cannot happen without a
spirit of intellectual freedom. Of the Smalltalks, Squeak is the
community with the greatest interest in and respect for intellectual
freedom. Pursuant of that the Etoys project endeavors to help the most
number of people to realize their potential. It may sound high minded,
but I see a inverse correlation between people's ability to realize
their potential and the amount of war, rape, murder, and terror in the
world. Intellectual freedom is required as a foundation.

Squeak is the Athens of Smalltalk. We are not the Sparta of Pharo or the
Persian despots of Cincom. Sparta had its moments against Sparta, but if
you visit it today, it's an empty field. As opposed to the Acropolis.
Which of the two is more inspiring?

The question is simple. Do you want to be assimilated into a vision
created by the managers of Cincom and Pharo? Or do you want to be
assisted by means of software in realizing what is lying dormant inside
of you?

The code is just the clay. It's the spirit that give is shape. Ours
community is the most intellectually free.

Chris

Guys thank you for the answers so far. It is good to see this feedback from the community!

Hernán